URL slug generator

What a URL slug is

The slug is the last part of a page's address, the bit after the final slash. In example.com/blog/sourdough-bread-at-home, the slug is sourdough-bread-at-home. Most content systems make one from the title when you publish and let you edit it before you do.

People see it more often than you'd think: in the address bar, in links pasted into chats and emails, and in the breadcrumb line Google shows above some results. A readable slug tells them what's behind the link before they click it.

What makes a good slug

• Lowercase. Some servers treat /Sourdough and /sourdough as two different pages.
• Hyphens between words. Google's URL guidelines recommend hyphens over underscores, because a hyphen reads as a break between words.
• Words, not ID numbers. The same guidelines suggest simple, descriptive words where you can.
• Short. Around 60 characters or fewer: usually the main keyword and a word or two around it.
• Stable. Pick one you won't need to change, which is why dates and counts are worth leaving out.

Accents, symbols and other alphabets

Accented letters lose their accent: café becomes cafe, Straße becomes strasse and Łódź becomes lodz. Apostrophes join the word back up, so "don't" becomes dont rather than don-t. An ampersand becomes "and", a percent sign becomes "percent", and every other symbol becomes a word break.

Letters from other alphabets, such as Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic or Japanese, are kept as they are, because there's no single right way to spell them in A to Z. Those URLs work: Google's guidelines allow them when they're UTF-8 encoded, and browsers show them as written. The catch is that some apps turn them into long strings of %-codes when the link is copied, so plenty of sites still pick a transliterated or English slug.

Filler words: keep them or cut them?

Words like "the", "of" and "a" make a slug longer without making it clearer, so the option to remove them starts switched on. "The Complete Guide to Baking Sourdough Bread at Home" becomes complete-guide-baking-sourdough-bread-home.

A few short words are kept on purpose. "How", "what" and "why" are often the search itself, "not" and "no" flip the meaning, and "to" stays after "how" so how-to slugs still read naturally. If a removal makes the slug read oddly, switch the option off and edit by hand. The goal is a slug a person can read, not the shortest one possible.

Changing the slug of a live page

Changing a slug changes the page's address. Links from other sites, bookmarks and Google's index all still point at the old one, so add a permanent (301) redirect from the old URL to the new one and update your own internal links. Google's documentation describes a permanent redirect as a strong signal that the new URL should replace the old one.

That's real work for a small gain. Tidy slugs on new pages freely, and change old ones only when the URL is actually wrong, such as a year that now makes the page look stale or a product name you no longer use. Then check the redirect lands in one hop.